Is it or isn’t it?

I was riding the 1 train downtown when I spotted a familiar face across the aisle. He had that air of someone you vaguely remember but haven’t seen in ages. I scanned all of the places I could have met a partially bald, slight man with salt-and-pepper beard: work, coffee shop, library.

Then a name popped into my head. Barry. Barry Lewis! Not exactly an A-list celebrity, I know, but in New York he’s well known for his PBS series, “A Walk Around…” As in “A Walk Around Brooklyn” or “A Walk Around Harlem.” He takes you to places of interest and gives you nuggets of social, political and architectural history with such enthusiasm, I dare you to turn the program off. And here he was on the same train.

I have spotted a few honest-to-God celebrities while riding the subway. Michael Imperioli of The Sopranos and Steve Buscemi come to mind. Steve Buscemi has, shall we say, such a unique look about him that you’re not left wondering if that was really him or just his doppelganger. Because the more I looked (okay, stared) at Barry Lewis, the more I doubted my first judgment.

(My best celebrity sighting hands down was Harrison Ford in the Village. He was heading east on Houston; I was heading west. I turned to search for him in the crowd but he was gone. Like two ships passing in the night. Oh, Hans!)

When I got off the train at Chambers to transfer to the 2/3 heading to Brooklyn, Barry stayed on the 1, which terminates in a few stops at South Ferry. Now I truly second-guessed myself. He’s going to Staten Island? That seems crazy.

Robert Lanham has a funny essay in The Subway Chronicles book called Straphanger Doppelganger in which he seeks out his look-alike after numerous friends have mistaken his doppelganger for him. Lanham points out, “According to mythology, a doppelganger is the living incarnation of a person’s dark side. Their shadowy opposite.” Maybe this person who sat across from me was Barry Lewis’s double: a Staten Island-bound, insurance adjuster who didn’t know or care about the difference between Central Park and Bryant Park. Lanham goes on to say that coming to terms with the existence of our nonbiological twin is part of living in New York. In a city this size, everyone is bound to have one.

As if to prove the truth in that statement, today I sat next to an elderly black woman on the commute to work. I might not have noticed her except that she scooted over and motioned for me to sit. She had a calmness and elegance that reminded me of my high school English teacher, Mrs. Sutton. Everything about Mrs. Sutton was grace personified. Her reputation was one of toughness and an unwillingness to compromise. For us seniors, there would be no easy “A”. She wasn’t our friend or confidant; she didn’t stand at the front of the class to entertain us. And I loved her for it. Mrs. Sutton was a big part of the reason I decided to major in English. Lately, another opportunity to second-guess myself.

In the creative arts, one of the few professional tracks where there is a high likelihood that you will never be able to support yourself in your chosen field, it’s easy to doubt your choices and your ability. Maybe doppelgangers don’t always stem from the dark side, the Darth Vaders of the Force. Maybe they appear in order to remind us of someone or something we’d lost track of along the way, giving us an opportunity to reconnect with that part of ourselves we had misgivings about.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

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At my office grab bag holiday party last week, someone actually got a wooden ying/yang salt-and-pepper shaker.

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It’s only $14.00 (discounted if you order from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.com). Can’t think of a better stocking stuffer.

Check out the table of contents in my profile section or visit the website for more details.

A Book By Its Cover

I’m rereading In a Sunburned Country, a book by one of my favorite authors, Bill Bryson. This book is autographed by him. I’d had the good fortune to attend a recent book signing/reading – the only one he’d done in New York City on this tour.

Permit me to digress here on an unrelated note to say that this event was standing room only – at least 150 people crammed into a little section of the bookstore. When Bryson appeared and made his way to the podium, the audience gave him a standing ovation, before he even said a word. Compare this, if you will, to many Subway Chronicles readings where I’ve actually asked store cashiers to sit in the seats so at least the authors could read to a live person.

If you’ve any familiarity with Bryson’s work, you’ll agree he’s an incredibly astute and humorous writer, honing in on the “everyman” quality of any situation he’s in. It’s not uncommon to be chuckling or suppressing an outright laugh should you find yourself reading his books in public, an experience I had just this morning, which I’ll get to in a moment. Really it couldn’t be avoided as close to 90 percent of my reading is in fact done in public.

My subway commute gives me an hour per day of reading time. Occasionally I read magazines and the free AMNY or Metro newspapers that get shoved into my hand at the station entrances, but most often, I’m reading a book. As a novelist-to-be (Do I say “to be” if I’ve spent six years of my life on the damn thing and am just waiting to hear back from the agent? C’mon Agent, call me!) I’ve got many books in my queue, more than I’ll ever get to in a lifetime, classified as: books I should read (A Tale of Two Cities), books I need to read to stay current (Prep), books I’ve tried to read many times, but just can’t seem to connect with (Mrs. Dalloway, sorry Virginia Woolf) and books I want to read to complete some sort of compendium (all books by James Thurber, for example).

Another digression: A recent article in Slate queried well-known writers to find out which books they’ve never read, but felt they should have. They called it their “gravest literary omissions.” For Amy Bloom, it’s Moby Dick; for Myla Goldberg, it’s To the Lighthouse (another Woolf avoider); for Lucinda Rosenfeld, it’s Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (BTW – read her fabulous essay in The Subway Chronicles: Scenes From Life in New York); amazingly for John Crowley, it’s To Kill a Mockingbird. This last one, of course, is really unforgivable. No excuses. Here is an occasion, I’d let him slide by just seeing the movie – Gregory Peck makes an indomitable Atticus Finch.

I get a lot of reading material suggestions from riding the subway. A few years ago nearly every literate citizen of New York was reading Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. I ran out to buy a copy with the picture of the blurred elevated tracks to see what all the fuss was about. Then you couldn’t throw a Metrocard without hitting the chalkboard-like cover of Me Talk Pretty One Day, a collection of essays by David Sedaris. Or Eat, Pray, Love, the title outlined in pasta, prayer beads and silk fabric is so creative, it compels me to believe the writing is also (which it is), however ridiculous this seems. Lately I feel I can’t escape the little crown-wearing green frog of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Man of My Dreams. I like the frog. It makes me want to read the book.

As I was reading In a Sunburned Country on the 2 train, a passage made an uncontrollable snort issue from the back of my throat. My eyes darted around like the worst espionage spy ever while I sneaked a look to see who might have witnessed my embarrassing outburst. A man sitting in front of me laughed and pointed. I was horrified that I was the object of his ridicule.

“That’s a great read,” he said. “Bryson’s the best.”

I smiled and nodded, satisfied that he was pointing at the kangaroo on the cover and just recalling his own Bryson moment – proof that you can judge a book by its cover.

Second Avenue Line: There’s No Telling

A few months ago an article in The Hartford Courant lamented the question most New Yorkers stopped asking ages ago: “Why does it take so long to get anything built?”

After all, the Empire State Building was built in about 18 months. The entire Erie Canal, trenched out with animals and plows, finished up in 1825, just eight years after they broke ground. Before dump trucks and bulldozers, the city’s first subway line, the IRT running from City Hall to Grand Central, over to Times Square and then up to 145th Street with 28 stations, took just four years to complete in 1904.

This recently came to a head as the tunneling for the Second Avenue subway line gets underway after an on-again, off-again relationship that would make Britney and K-Fed’s heads spin. The ceremonial spade has broken ground and two traffic lanes have been closed for the transportation nightmare that will be the estimated five year, $5 billion project for the first phase.

Maybe this problem is an American one. Phase 1 of the Dehli Metro in India spans 65 km with 59 stations. It was completed in four years for US $2.4 billion. Beijing boasts that their city will have five subway lines when the Olympics opens in 2008. They had only one just a dozen years ago.

This first phase of the Second Avenue line (to be called the “T” line) will link 96th Street to the tunnel already built at 63rd Street with only three new stations. Phase two, well, I’ll keep you in suspense, but rest assured it will take longer and be more expensive. The tunnel at 63rd Street was completed in the 70′s. This is a thirty-year gripe in the making, folks. Don’t think the Upper East Siders aren’t going to milk it for all it’s worth.

But really these complaints are nothing new. Turn-of-the-century New Yorkers took plenty of pot shots at the IRT, built speedily by today’s standards. The New York Times reports that “even the workers had stopped trying to bet on when. ‘Anyone who tries to say exactly when this work will be finished,’ one mining forman said, ‘is a blamed fool. There’s no telling.’”

Photo credits: Curbed.com

You Can’t Get There From Here

I have been talked into attending the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade by a few friends. Each year people dress in their strangest to be part of the festivities along Sixth Avenue. It’s simultaneously fun and ridiculous. One of those once-in-a-lifetime events that seems to be a great idea, like driving across country and skydiving, but then as soon as you set off, you immediately can’t help wondering why in God’s name you agreed to do it.

The parade is nothing more than an excuse for people to dress and behave in ways they wouldn’t normally dress and behave. This is despite the fact that only five people actually have a view of the parade itself. Most everyone else mills about the sidelines bumping into one another, craning to get a glimpse. When my friends and I realize that we wouldn’t even get close enough to the parade to crane, we go for a drink and head home. I do not find this upsetting in the least.

As this is the thirty-fourth year of the parade, the police and MTA have the proceedings down to a science, sort of. Some subway station stairs are changed to entrance only and some are exit only. There are miles of blue police barricades to shuttle people more efficiently and officers position themselves every few feet, above and below ground. One crucial bit of information they’ve left out is to put up signs to tell passengers which station entrances to use. My friend, who takes the same train, and I try to get underground at one of the Christopher Street station entrances. After we are halfway down the stairs, a policeman tells us in an exasperated voice that this is exit only. We must go back up and cross over Christopher Street to enter via a different set of stairs. My reasoning that we are almost to the turnstiles is met with a motion of his hand to leave.

We follow along the barricades, at a pace equivalent to the movement of tectonic plates, to cross the street. In this 50 yard walk, I see Superman, two pirates, a pregnant nun and the Tasmanian devil. When we reach the station entrance we feel certain we were told to use, another policeman asks, “Where do you think you’re going?” I wish I had dressed as Dorothy and could click my ruby slippers to magically transport me home. He points to yet another set of stairs, this time on the same side of the street. With considerable effort we get back into the crowd and shuffle along. This is the height of the parade and throngs of people who think they are going to see something are still pouring into the Village. Finally we get to the one place at which the police will allow us to enter the station. I swipe my metrocard and the train comes within a few minutes packed with passengers. But this is no normal train. The doors slide open and the first one off is a man wearing a coconut bra over his green turtleneck. Then a menagerie of animals, long-dead historical figures and superheroes follow. Just before the doors close a monkey hops out drinking an iced latte. They don’t call this the urban jungle for nothing.